by Drew Stepek
“You had better make this quick,” Linnwood insisted, still giggling. “I’m sure you have a lot more canvassing to do today in your quest to ‘Keep Austin Weird’.”
“Goddammit, Cody!” I yelled as I tore the back spoiler off of the Mustang and lifted it over my shoulder.
Trying to contain himself, Linn stood upright and tucked his gun into his belt. He put up his hands to surrender. “Is this any way to greet an old friend, RJ?” He turned to his boys again and put his finger to his lips. “Shhhhhhh.” He twirled back around daintily. “Put the spoiler from your ’stang down. We’re here to talk.”
I bent the black spoiler behind my head taking aim at his face like a baseball player. “It’s not my fucking Mustang, asshole.”
He continued to wave a white flag with his hands by pushing his palms toward me. He spoke in a calming voice. “What’s this about?”
“You know what this is about. You set me up in L.A. You sent me to kill that rat. Garvin? Davin?”
“Gavin,” he corrected me.
I choked up on the spoiler and readied it to swing. I could have taken his head clear off his body. “Yeah. You sent me to kill him. Then, Dez and I took the heroin that was supposed to be coke. You set us up with Cobra.”
He walked over to one of his buddies and put out his hand. “That’s not the way it went down, friend.” The other Perry dropped a cigarette into his palm. Linn started packing it on the face of his watch. “Cobra and everyone else had been trying to push you out of Hancock Park for ages.”
“Oh, bullshit, Linn.”
He stepped toward me. “Come on, RJ. Put the spoiler down. I didn’t set you up. I was being pushed out, too. Besides, it was your brilliant idea to steal the heroin. Everyone knew you would.”
“Where were these meetings even taking place?” I let the bumper fall to my side. “Was this the grand council of asshole drug dealers?”
“A junkie is a junkie. A cokehead is a cokehead. I would have done the same thing. I seriously sent you there to kill Gavin. I had no idea that they switched the drugs.”
The spoiler fell to the ground and a clanking sound zoomed down the ramp.
“Smart move.” He straightened out his sweater. “Like you could have taken all of us out with that spoiler. We all have guns. Besides, we aren’t an Austin gang.”
I tossed the ski mask aside over by my sweatshirt. “Meaning?”
“We’ve heard that you have already flattened two of these gangs on your own. Name one gang in L.A. that you could have done that to.”
I scratched the hair over my ear but came up empty. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
He stepped back to his driver, whose arms returned to his back as he straightened up. Linnwood picked a piece of lint off of his jacket and then brushed it a little. “It’s because they weren’t cut from the same cloth as us.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
He put his arm around Watts. “I have been to Austin for SXSW several times. Besides Rodderick, these maggots are all bottom feeders. Nobodies. It pains me to even have to relocate here.”
“Why the fuck would you want to move here? You owned Beverly Hills.”
“Guess what, RJ? Every L.A. gang was wiped out.”
I didn’t second guess him because I knew everything he said was true. “What about this Rodderick dude? Eldritch and I have been trying to get ahold of him since we’ve been here.”
He took his arms off the driver. “Really? Why? Do you want his autograph?”
I rung the sweat out of the ski mask in my fist. “Why would I want his autograph, asshole?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?” He pointed to the shirt again and snickered.
I knew better than to tell anyone besides Rodderick about Pinball. Bad memories about Los Angeles and Bait returned. “We have a business proposition for him.”
“A business proposition? Hmmmm. Are you sure that’s what you want?” He paced in front of his gang. “Fine. I’ll text him. But first—” he paused as he stepped over to Watts and brushed off the sleeve of his coat and then reached around to the back of his head, “—let’s get high.”
He latched onto the driver’s hair and smashed his face through the limo window. As the cap fell on the other side of the door, Linnwood sawed through his neck using the newly jagged window glass. The driver’s eyes open wide with shock as Perry jerked his jugular vein back and forth. The body trembled and the poor man tried desperately to open a breathing passage before he swallowed his tongue.
I looked at the spoiler because this was a strange turn of events. “You kill your own now?”
Linn laughed as he beat Watts’s neck further into the glass. “Oh, God, no. I found this idiot on Craigslist. I told him I could make him a vampire last year.”
“Please,” Watts begged as his mouth filled with blood and he started drowning internally. Satisfied that he was going to hold on long enough for us to get some of that glorious warm, living heart blood, Linn walked over to one of the boys, who handed him a towel. As three of the other Perrys stretched the arms to keep the driver alive for a few more second, one of them opened the trunk, then opened a duffle bag and finally pulled out a bag of coke. It was wrapped in the same brown paper that the drugs in Cody’s garage were wrapped in. He walked over to me and brought me in for a hug.
Ask if hE hAs hEroin.
“Do you have any junk?” I asked.
Linwood patted me on the back and yelled back to his gang. “Of course not,” he whispered in my ear. “Heroin is for gutter people.”
I pushed him away. “Thanks, dick.”
It didn’t take long for me to remember what a ruthless bunch of butchers the BBP were. Guns or not, they would have fucked me up.
Linnwood and I sat in the stairwell outside the entrance to level six of the parking structure.
“You killed that lap dog of yours, didn’t you?”
Against my better judgment and Eldritch’s stern speech about right and wrong, I took a slug off Watts’s arm. “Dez? No, he ran away like a punk bitch.”
“Shit,” Linnwood said. “I hated that kid. No one ever wanted to do business with you because that little pussy was always around. Then he would try and get people on board to help take you down.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.” Following my lead, Linn picked at Watts’s other arm and dumped some coke into the open wound on top. “I know you think I had a lot to do with setting you up, but the truth is that I was just another pawn like you.”
“Look where that got us.” I raised the arm to cheers. I pointed toward the Perrys who were picking at the rest of the body that was still hanging off of the busted window of the Benz. “Is that all that’s left?”
He returned my cheers and we high-fived the two arms in the air. “Of the Perrys? Yeah. The Cloth came at everyone hard. Sangre. Batwangers. Stillettos. Time Pilots. It didn’t really matter.”
I was responsible for the end of Nomi and the Batwangers, but I kept that book closed. It wasn’t so much that I was worried Linn cared about a vampire code like Eldritch as it was that he would think I was working for The Cloth.
“The gangs in L.A. are all but gone,” he continued. “So, I packed up the boys. Since we come out here every year for SXSW, I figured we could just come out here and take over the coke scene. As I said, these vamps are soft.” He tore into the jugular vein of his arm and peppered on a little more coke. “Whatever happened to that whore junkie that you used to fuck?”
“The Habit?”
“Yeah, that little girl from TV.”
“She’s the one who killed Cobra. She fucked off somewhere.”
“Good riddance to him. He was a shitty leader.”
I ignored the comment about Cobra. I felt the coke scratching and ripping its way through my body. Might as well throw some poison ivy on the mosquito bite on top of the chicken pock. “Why does everyone keep talking about South by Southwest like they come here
all the time?”
He shoved me and I teetered into the wall next to me. “All of us have been coming here for years. It’s pretty much the vampire Mardi Gras.”
I pulled myself up straight using the hand rail over my head and started buzzing my tongue in between my teeth. Just like the night before, this crazy stimulant was making me pulsate and shiver. “Wait? What? Quit fucking around. I didn’t know that. Fucking weird, dude. Fucking not cool.”
“Good coke, huh?” he asked.
“I did a bunch of cock last night at the guy Bromski’s house. It’s creeper-insane.” I slapped my hands against the wall like I was playing bongos.
“Ha!” He spat up a mouthful of blood. “You did a bunch of cock? Ha! Bromski? Good ol’ Bromski.”
I launched myself off of the wall. “Who’s Bromski?”
“I don’t know who the hell Bromski is. You just said you sucked his cock. Don’t you mean Broski?”
“Yeah, that’s him.” I started hopscotching up and down, from step to step. “He kept trying to tell me that he was just a distributor and not a drug dealer.”
“That’s how the whole system is set up out here,” Linn began. “It’s too bad that the gangs are so weak because the system is much better than Cobra’s shitshow.”
I jumped down to the landing at the bottom of the staircase and yelled back. “Well, how does it work? Enlighten me on the brilliance of Austin.”
“Rodderick runs it, but he’s a big Hollywood star and all.”
The stairwell become smaller and the world moved like a flip book—ten thousand frames a second. I ran up it and panted like an animal. When I reached the top, I leapt onto the other landing like I was hoping onto home plate after hitting a home run. “So?”
“So, he can’t be tied back to drug dealing, idiot. He runs all this cancer research and charity nonsense. He’s in the public eye constantly.”
“Well, then how does he do it?” I asked. I wanted to get as much information about Rodderick as I could.
“The gangs are weak. He rules over them. It works like this.” Linnwood put Watts’s arm on the top step. “This is Rodderick. He’s top of the heap.” He pushed the arm back further from the ledge. “Only you can’t see him because as far as everyone know, he isn’t involved.” He put his phone two steps down. “These are his generals. The leader of every gang reports to him and pushes the product to their gangs.” He dropped his money clip next to his phone. “Parallel to the generals are the Minutemen. They are kind of like private security. They make sure that the vamps don’t get out of control and ensure they do their job.”
I sat down again but my body was buzzing harder and harder from the drugs, making it difficult to focus or sit still. “So, it would be like Cobra working with The Cloth?”
“Kind of. Except for the fact that these dudes aren’t religious. They are the Austin equivalent to a vigilante border patrol. All they care about is making money and keeping Rodderick in the shadows. They clean up the messes that the vamps cause.”
I shook my head like a maraca. “Yeah, I’ve seen them in action. Where do the gangs fit into this?”
He dug into his pocket and threw a pack of matches down a few steps. “These are the distributors. Like Cody Walker. They deal with the generals very little but they get the drugs to the gang members and the lower gangs. Rather than all the gangs being equals, like L.A., a bigger gang such as the Sixth Street Skulls runs the street and controls gangs like The Real McCoys, The Chaplins and the Rattlers. There are also these dumb human go-betweens who think we can turn them into vampires. They get the drugs, break it up and give it to the gangs.” He pointed to the middle of the staircase. “We intercepted Walker’s drop after these fools picked up the trailer.”
“That was asshole-ish.”
“We have to let them know that the BBP is here.”
I studied the steps that Linnwood used to show me the hierarchy. “So, where are these gangs?”
He pointed to the bottom of the stairs. “See that piece of toilet paper?”
I squinted. “No.”
“Exactly. They are so far removed from the top they don’t even matter.” He put his white leather shoe between the phone and the money clip. “This is where I want to be. I want to be running the generals and not reporting to the fucking Minutemen.”
“Does this guy Rodderick even know you? Eldritch knows him but he’s not returning calls.”
“Eldritch?” he screamed. “That asshole is out here?”
“Well yeah, duh. I told you we were looking for him.”
“Tell him that Dracula wants his fucking gear back.”
“Shhhhhhh,” I insisted as I raised my finger.
“Shhhhhhh, what?”
I waved my hands to quiet him down. “Shut up.” I grabbed the blood bong under my armpit and put Watts’s hand over his mouth.
We waited for a minute.
“You hear that?” I finally asked.
“Yeah, man.” He closed his eyes to concentrate. “Sounds like someone is spraying water on the ramps above us.”
“Shhhhhh.” I pulled myself to my feet and put my ear through the door into the garage. “Hold this.” The arm fell to my side. Common sense told me that I would be able to decipher any sound if it were near me but considering the state I was in, everything sounded like it was in a wind tunnel. “Kinda sounds like someone rolling a steel ball down a sink.”
Linnwood jumped to his feet. “Yeah. That’s exactly what it sounds like. Eat more coke.”
“Why,” I responded as I twirled the arm like a baton.
“Eat it,” he insisted. “Now!”
I dug my teeth into the center of the arm, trying to get as much cocaine and blood into my body as possible.
He ran into the garage and threw his arm at the other Perrys. “Hey!”
They all looked up to him at the same time. Their faces and proper clothing were drenched in Watts’s blood. “Yeah, Linn?”
He waved his arms for silence. “Quiet!” One of them continued to chew on flesh. Impatient, as most coke addicts are. Linnwood booted him in the face. “God dammit,” he said. “Fucking shut the fuck up!”
They all turned on their listening caps.
“I don’t hear anything,” one said.
“Maybe a bunch of dudes are pissing off the roof,” another added.
I stumbled over to them, knelt down near the center of their pow wow like a coach going over plays during a time out and took a small dollop of blood and coke from Watts’s heart. “Listen closely.”
Linnwood reached into the Benz and grabbed his gun.
KURATCH!
A car windshield a floor above us was smashed. The car alarm discharged.
KURTACH!
Another car alarm started blaring.
One of the Perry’s whispered, “Maybe it’s an earthquake?”
Linnwood took aim around the corner of the ramp coming down toward us. “It’s not an earthquake, you idiot.”
KURATCH!
I covered my ears. The sounds of multiple alarms bouncing off the walls of the parking structure where clouding my already gridlocked head.
Another windshield was smashed and another alarm when off.
“Get up, you dumbfucks!” Linnwood screamed at his soldiers. “Get your fucking guns out.”
The Perrys scrambled to get to their feet. Mimicking their leader, they all cocked their guns and aimed them at the hook in the ramp. Who or whatever was around that corner was camouflaged by a thick concrete wall. The original sound intensified. I realized that it was the sound of several pairs of roller skate bearings spinning at around ten miles per hour.
I started jogging back to the door.
Linnwood shouted and stopped me in my tracks. “Where the fuck are you going, junky?”
I held up my phone. “I forgot my phone.”
He shot at my feet, just missing the toe of my left boot. After a little jitterbugging and tap dancing to avoid the bullet,
I ran back to the Perrys.
“It’s the RTL,” one of them yelled.
I was shaken awake in the middle of the ramp by the sound of all the Perry’s discharging their pistols.
“Fucking RTL! Fucking RTL! Fucking RTL!” Linwood cried.
The blow took further hold of my body. I squeezed my eyes shut and burrowed my nails into my shoulders to try and shock myself out of the buzzies. I blinked my eyes open toward the turn to see ten to twelve massive chicks in roller derby gear take the corner like a flock of Valkyries. They were all assembled in the same, back bent positions with one arm behind them and the other cranking toward us. They fanned out and half of them hunched behind the other half and clutched their hands around the waists, becoming parasites to their hosts. The Perrys frantically unloaded their hardware into the incoming battalion of bitches.
Before I had time to make a run of it, two of them were heading straight at me with no intention of slowing down. The host stood straight up as she started gliding. The parasite squatted further down and let go. As I started to turn and run, the host reached in between her red knee-high striped socks, pulled the parasite through and then fired her like a BB in a slingshot. I completely turned away and pulled my arms over my head as I felt the full force of her helmet collide with the center of my shoulder blades. I turned my head so the side of my face took the brunt of the impact. The good thing was that my teeth didn’t spill out on the permanent oil spill where I landed. The bad was that I crushed my jaw near my ear.
“Get off me, you fucking pig,” one of the Perry’s screamed.
All I could hear was chaos as the car alarms continued to blare and the Perrys continued to shoot their guns and scream. The parasite on top of me started pummeling the back of my head and the exposed side of my face with a wing mirror. The glass crushed under my cheek as I tried to turn my face. I rolled back and forth, making it more difficult for her to connect. Considering the wasted state I was in, it was about all I could do to defend myself.
During one of my evasive twists, I saw Linnwood jump on top of the limousine. Everywhere below him, different members of the BBP were tangled up with one or two of these derby girls. Linn took aim and at close range he blew a hole into one of the derby girl’s heads. As she dropped, her roller skates went into opposite directions causing her legs to split. To make sure she stayed down, Linn took a couple extra shots at her.